Under whose influence? Jared Diamond asks whether leaders or luck play a greater part in steering the course of history. By Bronwen Maddox t is tempting to respond to the title of Jared Diamonds latest book, Prof* its, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Make a Differ- ence? witha parallel query of “when do editors make a difference?” When they force an author to pose a clear question a…
children’s book of the week The BFG meets Irish folklore in this fable. By Lucy Bannerman welve-year-old Jacq has grown up being told theres only one good thing about giants: their bones. Her home city was built out of them. Her mum died hunting them. All the adults round her are united by the same belief: “The only good giant is a dead giant.” Readers of this story know different because it begin…
العدد ٢٩- ٦٤١٨ من أغسطس ٢٠٢7 2026 .با 29 -6418 ا مر. ررناسي قراءة فى كتاب أستاذ العلوم السياسية د. أحمد عبدربه (٢-٢) «عالم بلا قانون.. سياسة بلا مبادى الأقوياء القانون وفق ينتقل المؤلف فى النصف الثانى من »عالم بلا قانون -. سياسة بلا مبادئ« إلى المرحلة التى اكتملت فيها ملامح العالم الذى يحاكمه؛ حرب باردة قسمت الدول إلى معسكرات، وقوى ناشئة حاولت البحث طريق خارج الاستقطاب، وحروب بالوكالة أعادت …
All things great and strange Rebecca Abrams on a genre-defying portrait of a Polish village through the 20th century lga Tokarczuk’s third novel Primeval and Other Times, first published in Poland in 1996, met with instant critical acclaim and established her as one of Europe's most exciting contemporary nov- elists. Published in English in 2010 and reissued now (trans- lated as before by Antonia …
Into the Crucible Of War The Last of the Old Breed By Scott Davis St. Martin's, 336 pages, $30 “THIS BOOK IS NOT intended to act as a comprehensive account of the Pacific Theater, a sweep- ing tome of military strategy, or an in-depth study of squad-level tactics,” writes Scott Davis. “This is a story of memory.” In “The Last of the Old Breed,” Mr. Davis, a historian and journalist who runs the po…
books EE The best nove Joseph Heller never wrote A witty, cynical old hack finds he has a heart in this lost classic. By John Self ome books take a while to find their place in the world, and Steve Tesich’s Karoo is one of them. Tesich, right, was a Serbian-American screenwriter who wrote the script for The World According to Garp (1982) and won an Oscar for the screenplay for the Dennis Quaid fil…
Roy Cohn walks towards his Bentley in New York, 1977 — tie vork Tones Reus eye Lessons from a rogue A gripping biography of Roy Cohn, the chief counsel for Joseph McCarthy who went on to inspire Donald Trump's playbook. By Christopher Grimes n October 1973, Donald Trump was an ambitious 27-year-old from Queens trying to push his way into the world of Manhattan real estate. One evening he met Roy C…
hroughout the 20-year US military presence in Afghanistan, Taliban in gents knew there would be ‘time limit. As they put it: You have the locks, but we hive the time.” American technological domi nance on the battlefield would be no ‘match, they believed, for Washington's abily tog distracted. “Two tilion dollars and 20 years, it turned out, were the extent of the US commitment to Afghanistan, whi…
BOOKS “You fall in love with Rome only gradually, a bit at a time, and for the rest of your life.” ~NikoLAl cocoL A Russian’s Renaissance Evocations of Italy By Pavel Pavlovich Muratov Northwestern, 912 pages, $140 By Ana SiLiak NE OF THE most melancholy cultural histories is that of the short-lived Russian Renais- sance. Beginning in approti- ‘mately 1890, it was intended as a humanist revival an…
On an accidental mission for M16 William Boyd's latest Dax novel revisits 1960s spycraft with signature humour and irony, writes Magdalena Miecznicka tis 1964, and travel writer Gabriel Dax is having breakfast at a café on the Santa Monica Pier. Officially, he has come to California to research his next book. Unofficially, he is running an errand for MI6. The poet he isthere to meet possesses vita…
